Twilight

I found myself struggling to write today. Ours is a world that is crumbling. And I am not talking about tariffs and markets. Something doesn’t feel right in the gut. We are surrounded by death and ruin. So much of what we have taken for granted is now in question. Old languages do not seem to capture that something has broken. And new words that might bear the weight of this reality have yet to emerge. We stand betwixt and between, between a dying world violently clinging to life and one that is desperately trying to come into being. By no choice of our own, we have been positioned as the midwives of what is to come. We have been charged to shatter the idols of the past, to touch them, as Friedrich Nietzsche would have us do, “with a hammer as with a tuning fork,” not to discard history, but to release ourselves into a different kind of imagining. Loosed from the shackles of old assumptions. We are living in the twilight of the idols.

Nietzsche was fond of Ralph Waldo Emerson, an unlikely pair I must admit. But in the introduction to his wonderful book, Nature, Emerson declared, with a hint of disdain, that

our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?...why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobes…There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Emerson laments how the past and its idols have us by the throat: how, in this instance, the old world suffocates our imaginings; how we are mere imitators of the true men and women of the age. He longs for an original relation to the world – an ongoing revelation.

I have struggled with the formulation for years, and I have found this vision, especially in my younger years, compelling. We are indeed more than mere imitations. Each of us has something to say to the world, and it is not a mere echo of what has already been said. The future awaits. But history grabs hold of our feet. We find ourselves caught between the pressures of the past, the weight of the present, and the promise of the future. And all too often the past overwhelms our voices and vision. We lose sight of what is and what could be. We slip into forms of mimicry and find comfort in the allure of imitation. Imagination imprisoned in a gilded cage. Our posture becomes melodramatic as we reach for past heroes as models and resist obvious villains – all within the frame of a politics, a way of life, that doesn’t quite match up with our own. Sometimes we do so without even knowing. We do so because the age wants us to be retrospective. It demands that we bow to its idols and relish its achievements. It wants us to live on the surface of things – to stay away from the gifts and surprises that rest in the depths of our living.

What does it mean to long for an original relation to this world against the backdrop of ruin and a decaying faith? How do we find our voices amid the groans and moans of discord and collapse? How do we, in the end, imagine a new world when history and our romance with it put us in a deep sleep.

I have come to learn over these many years that Emerson’s view was a bit overstated. If we are to imagine a new world something is required of you and me: an acknowledgement of the past that colors our current actions; a recognition that we are not unfettered, that our inheritance affects our dreams and our visions – especially here in the ruins with its shattered glass. Dreams and visions untethered to the life lived all too often end up repeating the horrors or creating new ones. So, with the St. Lucian poet, Derek Walcott, as we reach for new languages and as we reach for a new way of being in the world, we must ask what the twilight says.

We are witnessing the ugly underbelly of America, U.S.A as old antagonisms threaten to rend the Republic. Forces are trying to dismantle American democracy right under our noses. We hear the cries of those who cling to a version of American history that looks away from our national sins. In this place of tinsel and taffeta, we prefer our illusions neat and tidy, because Americans must remain, always, innocent.

To resign yourself to this world amounts to a sin against the Holy Ghost. Understand it and remake it. In the full light of a country drowning in its past and melancholic present, we are to break loose from the old frames, shatter the idols of traditions, and dare to imagine a new world.

The imagination is one of the most important battlefields today. We must imagine the world as it ought to be in the full light of what we have been and who we have become. Our world is fraught and vexed. A world of greed and selfishness. A world of grievance and resentment. A country that stands on the precipice. And whether it is fair to us or not, the fate of this Republic rests in our hands. History calls each of us in this moment. We must stand before the mystery and now, with awe and courage, and resist the temptation to reach for easy answers and performative gestures. Say no to the allure of nostalgia for the old comforts and old gods. Say no to the theatrics of anger. Understand the danger of a readily seen virtue as opposed to a life lived with conviction and meaning. Reach for something deeper. Dive beneath the surface..

We must imagine a new America, but that will require of us a confrontation with the ugliness of who we are rooted in what we have done. I believe that confrontation, and I must believe it if I am to survive this madness, will finally free us all. What does the twilight say?

In a commencement address delivered in 1984 at Sarah Lawrence College, the late Toni Morrison told the graduates to “dream the world as it ought to be…” To imagine that no one should die because they can’t afford healthcare; that every child, no matter the color of their skin or their zip code, should get a quality education; that every human being should be accorded dignity and standing and should be treated equally under the law; that no one should be seen as disposable. That no baby is valued more than any other baby. These are not the musings of radical madmen and women. Some communist cabal. This kind of world is possible. Morrison would say that it was necessary. “Necessary because if you do not feed the hungry, they will eat you.”

I pray more of us will understand that reality and instruction.

I wanted to write something for us today. To offer some kind of advice as we face the life that is irrevocably ours. To offer hope amid the storms that will get stronger and more dangerous. I refuse to believe this moment will have the last word. This is my faith. I refuse to believe that these people, so full of hatred, will define our future. The world remains cruel, and this country is especially maddening, but the words of Toni Morrison seem more resonant than ever. I have shared them with you before. Repetition is necessary and needed.

Of course there is cruelty. Cruelty is a mystery. But if we see the world as one long brutal game, then we bump into another mystery, the mystery of beauty, of light, the canary that sings on the skull….Unless all ages and all races of man have been deluded there seems to be such a thing as grace, such a thing as beauty, such a thing as harmony…all wholly free and available to us.

Grab hold of that beauty, live in that grace, and boldly dare to create a more loving and more just world. To hell with these people!

Ours, to echo William Faulkner, is an inexhaustible voice. We know of the sacrifices to get here. We know of the blood, sweat, and tears to get here. And we are not going to let them destroy it all. Grace and beauty remain wholly free and available to each of us no matter what they say or what they do or what corrupts their soul.

To shatter the idols, to touch with a hammer as with a tuning fork, is not to forget. We mustn’t forget “the problems of the human heart.” We mustn’t forget how we got over. We mustn’t forget the fears that drive men and women to idols and to the illusions of safety. We mustn’t forget. If we do, as Faulkner said, our “griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars.” Our imaginations become surfaced and barren; we write and act “not of the heart but of the glands.” We mustn’t forget. Each of us must bear witness, dream and see visions.

Don’t flinch. Don’t sulk. Be that inexhaustible voice, be that spirit capable of compassion, capable of sacrifice, capable of endurance. Capable of ushering in a new beginning. Gwendolyn Brooks comes to mind. “Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”